The Right Side of the News

For one thing, I remember after he had been in trade talks with Trudeau, Trump boasted of having just made up all the numbers he had presented.For another, numbers are a very fluid thing for Trump. A radio report traced a Trump claim which, as I recall, started with his having created 10,000 jobs. Then the next time he had created 20,000 jobs. Every time he repeated that claim, the number of jobs created continued to grow until it ended up approach a million.The bottom line is that Trump-cited numbers have no meaning. One of the several schemes for how the Wall will be paid for is the claim that by eliminating illegal immigration we can take the money that illegal immigration is costing us and put that to building the Wall, make the Wall almost self-funding.That ignores the tax revenues we get from illegal immigrants, from the taxes that they pay. While "independent contractor" illegals (eg, day laborers, home cleaners, gardeners) can operate on a cash only basis being paid directly by their customers, illegals who work for a company and receive a paycheck need to go through the motions, usually with fake IDs (like the ones that Trump's resorts got for their own illegals). Those illegals get payroll taxes (eg, FICA for Social Security and Medicare) and income tax withholding taken out of their pay. And since they don't have valid IDs, they cannot receive any Social Security nor Medicare benefits, nor (to my knowledge) can they file income taxes to get any refund. Plus all illegal immigrants pay the same day-to-day taxes that we all pay (eg, sales tax, gas tax, property taxes through their rent payments). It turns out that illegal workers pay more in taxes than they receive as benefits. The "cost of illegal immigration" turns out to be a net gain, not a liability -- http://www.ncsl.org/...te-reports-on-fiscal-immigration.aspx.So even if we were to completely eliminate illegal immigration, we would end up losing money instead of gaining. And that's not even including the adverse effects of stores losing customers, landlords losing renters, and businesses losing employees.

The first sentence contradicts the second sentence. As stated before, there are no facts that could ever change your mind.

'The left' without qualification is a very broad sense. I'm nor insisting it can only be used in that way, but if you're using a narrower context, such as 'the left of the US Congress' then it would help to specify. Well, this seems to be a regular question on the Fox News poll which they'd asked repeatedly over the past decade; rather than just being something related to current political debate. And the answers seem to suggest that 'moving away from capitalism' is not just a weird fringe opinion. Quite a few Americans seem to like the suggestion; with the highest response in favour being the 36% who said it would be a good thing on the 2018 survey.

I hear numbers like that all the time on my conservative radio shows, not from Trump, just from the hosts who collect such information. It no doubt includes the costs of the border patrol, detention facilities and staff, transportation costs, food costs, medical costs, police and legal costs in many places in the country, and lots more. The number I hear most is that one illegal immigrant costs us $70,000 per year, not sure what all that includes, but it's many times my own income.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Maybe you should ask them for source and evidence for these figures. Because they are pulling them out of their ass. If the figures were real they would tell you how they came up with them.

I don't lie, there are better explanations for discrepancies between what I'm saying and what you think, the main one being that YOU are the one in the wrong.I'm sure they do show how the numbers are arrived at but I don't keep track because it never occurs to me I'm going to be posting these things here.Another part of the cost they are no doubt including is the cost in drug trafficking, deaths from drugs, medical and police involvement in that etc.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

So there is absolutely no reason to believe any of the numbers that you and other conservatives seem to pull out of your ass. Like I have said before if you have no source or evidence you have no argument."What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
Christopher Hitchens

And what figures do your conservative radio shows give for tax revenues we get from those illegal immigrants? Or the other benefits to our economy that they give us? Or the companies that their labor keeps in business, such that those CEOs are now very concerned that they're going to go out of business without those workers (down-side being that they are exploiting those illegals, which is another reason why we need to solve the problem of getting legal status)?Which of your conservative radio shows point out that those tax revenues and boosts to our economy exceed the costs of illegal immigration? None of them, I'm sure, because they don't want you to know. They want to keep you scared and angry, because that keeps you from thinking. http://www.ncsl.org/...te-reports-on-fiscal-immigration.aspx

That can't possibly amount to much, especially considering that they are displacing American workers. Of course Americans would have to be paid better but the overall cost has to be hundreds of times greater than any benefits.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If I've misjudged the context of this thread and people have been using the term "the left" as including Marxists and communists then my bad, but I don't think I have. This ignores what was already pointed out, that the question poses a false dichotomy. Capitalism and socialism are not opposites. It is capitalism and Marxism that are opposites.Because of the false dichotomy there's no way to know what the answer means, because you don't know how many people put the stress on "moving away from capitalism" versus how many on "moving toward socialism." If the question had been posed properly it would have looked like this:

13. Do you think it would be a good thing or a bad thing for the United States to move away from capitalism and more toward Marxism?

In which case the number of people saying it was a good thing would easily have been less than 10%.Since they improperly confounded capitalism and socialism as opposites it's not possible to know what they were truly trying to get at, but here's an example of a properly posed question that doesn't force people to make an impossible choice between capitalism and socialism:

13. Do you think it would be a good thing or a bad thing for the United States to move away from people being subject to the whims of events and circumstance and more toward a government safety net?

--Percy

I for one always include Marxism in "the Left."Capitalism and socialism ARE opposites. Capitalism can absorb some amount of socialism, but the current Democratic party is really aiming for Marxism despite your disbelief. Obama was raised in a Communist family. Sanders is a Marxist/Communist. The new crop of members of the House are Marxists. The old guard are really closet Marxists anyway. The whole PC mentality comes from Marxism. ANY degree of socialism tends towards Marxism too even if it can be contained by sane heads, and we have very few sane heads on the side of the Democrats these days. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And yet when those jobs open up, American workers fail to come flooding in to take them. I know it's been said too many times already, but there are jobs that Americans do not want to do. Like the A-TEAM in 1964 recruited to replace the braceros and the Guatemalan workers at the Fresh Mark meat packing plant in Salem, OH, arrested and scared off by a massive ICE raid. From my Message 534 reply to you (no response from you): Where were your American workers there? A lot of complaining about being displaced by immigrants, but when opportunity presents itself they're no-shows. That is true, which is why CEOs want immigrant labor which is cheaper and easier to exploit. That is why we need immigration reform to make that immigrant labor legal and to reduce exploitation.Hopefully, this negotiation on border security will lead to that much-needed immigration reform. Except that it's not. Read the reports from several states at that link I had just provided you: http://www.ncsl.org/...te-reports-on-fiscal-immigration.aspx -- the root page to several reports on the fiscal impact of immigration is at http://www.ncsl.org/...tion/fiscal-impact-on-immigrants.aspx.For example, Arizona reports all immigrants costing them $1.4 billion balanced by revenues of $2.4 billion from all immigrants, leaving a net positive of $940 million, meaning that the state makes more money from immigrants than it pays out for immigrants. $1.5 billion of those revenues come from unauthorized workers, so they more than pull their own weight; they are not a drain on society.As I laid it out for Percy in Message 721: I have no doubt that you will continue to cling to ignorance, but your love of ignorance does not change the facts.

Not correct. You are wrong.
One is a politucal system, the other is an economic system. There are a lot of socialist societies that have capitalism as part of their economic system.

And where do the radio show hosts' figures come from? I already cast serious doubt on the numbers. The total budget for Homeland Security is $47.5 billion. If Homeland Security is spending $19 billion/month on illegal immigration then multiplying by 12 months/year gives a total cost of $228 billion, exceeding Homeland Security's total budget by $180.5 billion. That's impossible. Obviously the figures are made up. It doesn't matter how many different categories of cost you enumerate because they must all be covered by Homeland Security's total budget. Of course you're not sure what it includes, because you're not giving it any thought, because it confirms what you want to believe anyway, and if you gave it any thought then it might not support your beliefs anymore. So allow me to do your thinking for you.First, $70,000/immigrant/year is absurd. Multiply by the 11 million illegal immigrants in this country and you get nearly $800 billion. That's an absurdly large and ridiculous figureSecond, how are these costs being incurred? Since they're illegal they can't receive any government benefits. From where and for what is money flowing to pay this supposed cost for an illegal immigrant?Third, you have to account for their contributions to the economy. They must have jobs. They must live somewhere and pay rent, eat meals and buy groceries, purchase clothing and furnishings, ride on public transportation, etc. Many illegal immigrants work on the books and pay taxes, including social security and medicare taxes, both of which you take advantage of. Your retirement is being funded in part by illegal immigrants. $70,000/year is many times your own income? That's truly a shame. Don't you think government should beef up social security so that recipients could have an income above the poverty line? If Trump is doing such a great job for you, how come you're living in poverty? Did you know that there are Republican efforts at reducing social security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits? How would it affect you if your social security benefits were reduced by $100/month?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Punctuation.

I'm pretty sure we can add "Marxism" to the list of things you don't understand.Would you consider the UK to be a socialist country?